NBM Show, Charlotte, NC

On Friday morning I got up at the crack of dawn to meet Joe at work. We drove up to BWI airport and met Mike to fly down to Charlotte for the NBM show, a digital graphics show where we were going to research the latest technology in our business. Our plane took off as dawn began lighting the sky and the view from my window was beautiful.

The gold on the engine is the sunlight as it crept up over the horizon.

Just an hour later we could see Charlotte in the distance and before long we were flagging down at taxi and pulling up at the Convention Center.

I managed to take this photo once Joe and I had recovered from a laughing fit. Mike is in the cab nursing his pride moments after falling headfirst into the vehicle. I've heard of people falling out of a car but not into it. He went headlong onto the floor of the cab and got no help from us, just howls and finger pointing. A great laugh to start the day!

Looking down onto the show floor. This is the smallest show I've been to but at least it would mean we wouldn't be dealing with large crowds as we tried to obtain information on machinery. My goal was to check out the progress on the direct to garment printers as performance has been lacking on most of them in the past few years.

The Brother machine has come a long way since I last saw it running 2 years ago and my skepticism was fading as I asked questions and watched it perform. 

It prints 2 whites first and then lays down CMYK. I was impressed with the print and took a shirt to give it a wash test to check durability. It's a pricey machine at around $60 for the full package and we'd need to mull over whether the investment would be worth it for Emblemax.

This is a high density t-shirt print, a very intricate show piece and not really for wearing. The texture and registration was very impressive.

We loved this wide format printer and are considering purchasing one of these to print our own stickers and transfers among other things. I'm really pleased about this as I've always had a thing for wide format printers. I have a room right next to my office just waiting for this printer.

At lunchtime we crossed over the road to Shops on the Green and into a restaurant called Fuel. It was decorated with awesome gas station paraphernalia and the food was great.

Just outside was this impressive view of a bronze stack of books and a skyscraper behind it. It would've been fun to explore Charlotte more but we decided to whizz round the show floor one more time and then try to get an earlier flight home since ours wasn't until 8pm.

A 17ft statue of Queen Charlotte stands outside the airport. It can look quite noble from other angles but until I looked it up online, I thought this was a witch.
We asked for an earlier flight and was told to inquire at the gate of the plane leaving at 5:50pm which we did. We laughed around with the guy at the desk and must have made a good impression since despite telling us that there were quite a few already on standby, when the time came to embark, he called our names. We were so pleased. We took off as the sun was setting and got to BWI early. Little traffic meant we were all home about 9:30pm and I could sip a long awaited glass of wine before I tumbled into bed.